Chapter 85

Chapter 85

How is Director Liu's behavior any different from that annoying habit of saying, "I'll tell you something... never mind, better not"?

The stairwell was filled with the raging fury of Jie Linyuan, Ian, and Marshall, whose appetites had been cruelly whetted. They were so incensed they wished they could drag Director Liu to the bathroom right then and there, dunk his head into the toilet, and demand he spill the beans.

Wu Yin wasn't among them, not because he was unwilling, but because he had already taken action. Despite his frailty and reliance on Jie Linyuan for support, Wu Yin, who never allowed himself to be trampled upon, had grabbed Director Liu by the collar and hissed, "Stop beating around the bush! They might not deserve to know, but am I also unworthy?"

Since taking over the bionic body from a mysterious figure, Director Liu had been unswervingly observing the glass nutrient vessel three times a day to check if the person had awakened. His dedication could only be described as parental. Hence, he was deeply hurt when the first thing the bionic body did upon awakening was to issue commands with a ferocious attitude.

"You... even you, I won't tell," Director Liu managed to wrestle his clothing free from Wu Yin's grasp, "If you want to know so badly, go find that friend of yours!"

Director Liu's colleague panicked, "Forget the secrets, we need to head to the shelter now, or you're all as good as dead by evening!"

Wu Yin, not yet versed in classical Chinese, looked helplessly at Jie Linyuan, who gently removed his hand and wrapped him more snugly in his lab coat, explaining, "It means even if you learn the secret now, but get devoured by a mutant in the next second, it's all for naught."

"...As if I'd let a mutant devour me," Wu Yin muttered sullenly, resting his head back against Jie Linyuan's neck.

As soon as the door to the stairwell opened, two arrows flew in succession, piercing through the zombies blocking the door. Ian, standing nervously behind the group with his bow, earned a surprised and somewhat appreciative look from Jie Linyuan, as if to say, "So you do have some fight in you after all?"

Embarrassed, he quickly drew a third arrow, but upon noticing Marshall watching him, he straightened up confidently towards Jie Linyuan, "Did you really think I faced off against the mutant dandelions without any confidence?"

Jie Linyuan charged out first, pausing to bend down next to a fallen contaminator's body. Wu Yin cooperatively pulled the arrow from the corpse's forehead and handed it back to Director Liu, who then passed it back to Ian.

Despite their scholarly and frail appearance, Director Liu and his colleague wielded their briefcases with surprising strength against the zombies. Marshall, often appearing as the delicate type reliant on men, demonstrated formidable combat skills with an iron pipe in hand when left to fend for himself.

Only Wu Yin was truly useless, proudly so, even daring to throw a tantrum when splashed in the face with zombie blood.

The entrance to the shelter was just around the corner from the stairwell, not an overwhelming distance. The team, consisting of four melee fighters and one ranged, quickly coordinated their way to the front of the door. Yet, the sight that met them was horrifying: the shelter's iron gate was sealed shut, stained deep red with the blood, flesh, and limbs of countless bodies, forming a small mound that completely blocked the entrance.

The group, initially determined to break into the shelter, halted in fear, their breaths trembling. The dark, ominous corridor before them seemed like the very entrance to hell.

What was most terrifying was that this bloody mountain of corpses was not outside the door but inside the shelter, behind the iron gate.

The people who took refuge, thinking themselves safe as they bolted the door, never realized that the greatest danger came from their last retreat.

The mound of corpses was slowly "awakening," with the dead returning to the world of the living in a peculiar manner. They struggled within the pile, their murky eyes restlessly moving in their sockets. The zombies at the top tumbled down like snow sliding off a mountain peak, emitting hoarse, sticky roars. Those pressed against the iron door were deformed, their faces' flesh grinding against the rough steel, their skin rubbed raw, yet they still greedily peered at the humans outside, reaching through the bars with their mangled hands, wildly waving them.

Marshall screamed in utter panic, grabbing Ian's arm without a care for who was who, desperately yelling, "I want to go back, I don't want to stay here anymore!"

Xie Linyuan dodged a zombie whose fingernail nearly grazed his hair, its cracked black nail filled with mud and dried blood. Even when dodged, it kept clawing until Xie Linyuan, with a swift backhand motion, sliced off its entire arm with a dagger. His movements were so fast, only Wu Yin saw his left hand turn into a bone-chopping knife at the moment of contact, saving a lot of effort. The rest thought Xie Linyuan had indeed chopped off the zombie's arm with a mere dagger.

Marshall and Ian swallowed hard with difficulty. In fact, even if they were slow to realize, they now noticed that Xie Linyuan's ears and tail had disappeared, but at this moment, they unanimously chose to feign ignorance.

Since the shelter had become more dangerous than the outside, the group had nowhere to go but to return to the stairwell to discuss their next plan.

"The other mutant we haven't seen has been hiding in the bomb shelter, waiting for its prey," Xie Linyuan said, "waiting for the panicked food to come to it."

"...How did it get so smart?" Wu Yin asked, jumping down from his back and resting on the stair railing, "Is it a coincidence?"

"Either it's a coincidence," Xie Linyuan recalled the interior behind the iron gate, the wall of human flesh built from blood and meat, "or someone deliberately lured it in..." he pondered, "Why? What's the purpose? To kill everyone in this hospital? What does this indiscriminate terror attack have to do with the real cause of the catastrophe?"

The more Wu Yin thought about their cluelessness, and the presence of someone who knew everything but refused to say, the angrier he got. He was always the type to not let anyone who annoyed him off easily until he achieved his goal.

With a gaze of eerie green falling upon the other four, Wu Yin quickly came up with an idea.

The next second, he struggled to stand upright, sharply telling Ian not to move, then reached into his pocket to pull out Liu Shu's red velvet box. He deliberately opened it in front of Director Liu to pretend to check if everything was intact, then closed it and tucked it into his coat.

Director Liu recognized it at a glance: "That's Liu Shu's jewelry box!"

"Hmm, she gave it to me," Wu Yin said indifferently.

Director Liu's eyes widened in shock: "How could she possibly have any contact with you?"

Wu Yin's plan was going smoothly. Turning around, he gave Director Liu a meaningful smile, taking on the role of the enigma, "Didn't the person who left me here tell you how I could possibly have contact with Liu Shu?"

Hearing that it was about his daughter, Director Liu's eyes visibly wavered, anxiously saying, "What do you mean?"

Seeing that Director Liu truly didn't know, Wu Yin and Xie Linyuan exchanged glances. The former skeptically asked, "You don't even know this, so what secrets of the apocalypse could you possibly know?"

"I..." The director realized he might be getting trapped in conversation, with his opponent cunningly exploiting his vulnerability.

"How about we exchange information?" Wu Yin suggested. "After all, if you can't trust others, can't you trust me, who just climbed out of a petri dish?"

The director sighed heavily, troubled. "I really can't say any more; last time, I spoke out of turn after drinking..."

"Then I'll go to the leader of the mercenary team. After pulling off such a big stunt, he must be eager to share. I believe he'd be more than happy to tell me something," Wu Yin said expressionlessly.

Jie Lin Yuan knew he was serious. If the director refused to talk, Wu Yin might indeed undertake a needle-in-a-haystack quest, like digging up the missing mercenary team to solve his problems.

Because Wu Yin is driven by emotions, one can never understand him through conventional thinking. Whatever comes to his mind, he does, unpredictable and impulsive, with no thought for the consequences.

In the current situation, a normal person's reaction would either be to condemn the mercenary team, believed to be behind the attack, wanting to end the chaos, represented by the director and his colleagues; or to flee in panic, preserving their own safety, avoiding trouble at all costs, as exemplified by Marshall and Ian.

Only Wu Yin, a man who neither cares about others' lives nor his own safety, lacking any sense of right and wrong, is driven solely by his curiosity, like the most discordant note in a musical score, chaotic and self-centered.

But... he's just an amnesiac parasite. What's wrong with being a bit selfish?!

Jie Lin Yuan is like a model student, suppressed by rules and yearning for freedom, yet always following them until he met Wu Yin, a rebellious underachiever, which almost made him lose his soul.

Under the gaze of those green eyes, his sense of the bigger picture gradually faded away, almost wishing the director would refuse, giving him a reason to leave the four burdens behind, and do whatever he wanted with Wu Yin, letting everyone else fend for themselves.

Unfortunately, things did not go as he wished. The clam, already slightly cracked, was soon pried open by the fisherman. The director finally capitulated, "I'll tell only you."

"Fine." Wu Yin glanced at Jie Lin Yuan, who immediately signaled Marshall and Ian to go upstairs. The two unambitious "sheep" showed no resistance, not curious about the apocalypse's secrets at all, with Marshall even uttering the profound truth: "The more you know, the faster you die."

The director's colleague also followed them up, leaving just the two of them. The director then quietly asked, "What's your name?"

"Wu Yin," he hesitated before deciding to tell the truth.

"Do you know what your friend's name is?"

"I don't know."

"Is it that you don't know, or you don't remember?"

"I can't remember."

Director Liu nodded, "This matches what he said. He mentioned it's highly likely you'd suffer from memory loss. Your friend is named Geng Xiaoma."

Wuyin: "..."

He deeply regretted not sticking to his initial instinct to reveal that most cherished name.

Director Liu took another deep breath, finally getting to the point: "Regarding the source of the calamity's contamination, most scientists have been looking in the wrong direction. The pollution isn't caused by an unknown virus, but by an unidentified organism that continuously divides and replicates itself. It can enter the human body in various ways—through breathing, skin contact, blood transmission... and then it immediately camouflages itself as part of the human body, which is why it's never detected under the microscope."

"It can't survive on its own, so its purpose in entering a human body is to find a suitable host for itself. Your friend referred to this process as 'parasitism,' which I think is quite apt. If it finds a suitable host, it will fully parasitize that body; if not, it will use the body's resources to divide and reproduce itself, and then leave the body at an opportune time to continue searching for another suitable host."

"When it divides, the body it had entered 'dies' quickly and becomes what we know as a contaminator. As for how it leaves, it attacks a living person and then enters their body to parasitize again."

Wuyin didn't need Director Liu to explain further; he understood that once successful, the human would become a mutant, like Xue Hongyi from the southern camp. Marshal Xue once asked Wuyin if the mutant Xue Hongyi was still his grandson. Wuyin had firmly said yes, but in reality, the current "Xue Hongyi" was a combination of the parasite and the human Xue Hongyi. It could be said to be both and neither; Wuyin simply chose the answer everyone wanted to hear.

"What's the origin of this unidentified organism?" Wuyin sensed that the parasitic creature causing the global calamity wasn't the same as him but seemed to be related to a certain extent, albeit at a lower level.

Perhaps it was a failed product among the sixty Jiazi test subjects...

Doesn't that mean it has a number?

He subconsciously thought of Gengwu as his brother. Could the creature causing this global chaos actually be one of his "younger brothers"?

The more Wuyin thought about it, the more irritable he became, asking, "What does my friend look like? Why did he leave me here? Did he say anything else?"

Director Liu shook his head, "He said he didn't know its origin either, as his memory is also incomplete. Your friend is a five-year-old boy, though, of course, that's not his real body. I believe he's actually a successfully parasitized host. As for why he left you here... he said he couldn't carry you anymore, you were too heavy... I think that's the truth, considering he's only five."

Wuyin: "..."

So the key lies in finding Gengwu. So where exactly is "that place"? If he knew memory loss upon awakening was possible, why be so deliberately vague?

Director Liu looked at Wuyin, "My guess is, you were probably artificially cultivated in a lab, specifically for conducting parasitism experiments on bioengineered bodies... Your disordered memories might be due to being parasitized... Obviously, the success rate of parasitism is absurdly low, who knows how many bioengineered bodies were destroyed before they succeeded with you."

Wuyin didn't respond but after pondering for a moment, asked with a frown, "Wait, what does all this have to do with someone deliberately leading a horde of zombies to the hospital?"

In fact, the principle of parasitism shares some similarities with virus transmission. Why, when the contamination virus was said to be spreading widely, was there peace within the hospital, but as soon as it was revealed to be parasitism, the mercenary team went mad?

Director Liu paused, then slapped his own left cheek, saying, "It's all my fault for talking nonsense after drinking." After that, he slapped his right cheek as well.

Wu Yin frowned deeply, hands in the pockets of his lab coat, simply standing there watching Liu engage in self-harm without any intention of intervening, his face expressing complete bafflement, showing zero understanding of social niceties.

After satisfying his urge to slap himself, Director Liu sniffed and said, "The leader of the mercenary squad stationed at the hospital is named Paul. He's an immune individual and a good friend of mine. Most of his team members are immunes too; partly luck, partly his deliberate choice in recruiting immunes as his comrades."

"Upon discovering an unsuitable host, the parasite doesn't always reproduce through division. In some humans, it becomes dormant, eventually integrating fully into the host's body, making them known as immunes."

"A week ago, a woman in labor at the hospital experienced severe bleeding, depleting all the blood in the cold storage. Coincidentally, a member of the mercenary squad fell off a mountain and also bled profusely, and they happened to have the same blood type... This person was Paul's childhood sweetheart, his wife. After surviving many life-and-death situations post-apocalypse and being bitten by zombies, they were prepared for the end, believing they were immunes."

"After his wife's funeral, he came to drink and chat with me. I was in a state of despair from repeated failures in my experiments. Drunk and uninhibited, I couldn't help but cry with him, thinking how foolish I was. Despite knowing more by chance and firmly believing in my research direction, I made no progress, and was mocked by researchers from other bases for my fanciful ideas."

"Drunk, he shared his true feelings, saying his wife, being an immune, could offer more value than the pregnant woman and her child. If only one could survive, his wife should have been the one to receive the blood transfusion first."

"In the heat of the moment, I also harbored extreme thoughts, telling him perhaps there's no stopping the spread of the parasite. Maybe once the unknown parasite has infected everyone globally, the calamity would end. Those who survive will continue living, and those who don't were meant to be eliminated. I consoled him, saying, 'Paul, don't think being called a mutant or a superhuman sounds powerful. In reality, immunes are the strongest among us.'"

Wu Yin vaguely understood something. Just as he was about to speak, he heard screams and commotion upstairs. Looking up in confusion, he abruptly asked, "Director Liu, your colleague…"

Director Liu, surprised, said, "He's also an immune!"